My grandfather lived on a farm in Middle Tennessee, a few miles outside of Murfreesboro, on Asbury Road. During the War Between the States, the terrible "Battle of Murfreesboro" was fought on this and surrounding farms as 1862 concluded and 1863 began. Granddad's farm was in the thick of battle, and as men fought, Federal surgeons used his farmhouse as a field hospital. I really got to know the place when my family lived on Granddad's farm for a year while Dad built our new house in Nashville. That was in 1948, three years after World War II. I was ten years old. My brother and I occasionally found parts of weapons, bullets, buckles and other military items while playing in the cedar thickets and walking through the fields, especially during plowing. In the farmhouse I stared at the numerous bloodstains that were visible in the wood of the unpainted upstairs floors. And the Federal military graveyard down the road contained row after row of gravestones that seemed to go on and on.
The battlefield map identified Granddad's house as the Widow Burrus house because she was the owner of the house and farm back then. I occasionally looked over at the little overgrown Burrus family graveyard that was situated in a cotton field about 100 yards from the house. The tombstones told me that the immigrant father, Lafayette Burrus had been born in Amherst County, Virginia, in 1799 and had died eight years prior to the battle. His wife, Eliza, known as Widow Burrus at the time of the battle, had been born somewhere near Murfreesboro. She lived until 1875. There were gravestones of two daughters and two sons. The graveyard revealed nothing about the first three sons, but folks said they moved to Texas. So, I suppose each is either buried in Texas or a battlefield graveyard somewhere.
Every school day, my school bus traveled beside the Federal military graveyard. I watched rows and rows of gravestones file past the bus window. I recall that, as I looked out the window, I often mourned all those dead men – over 6,000 Federal soldiers. And, as I lamented the untimely deaths of these men, my childhood mind sought the answer to what I considered then a simple question: “Why?” Why did men from the northern States come to Tennessee bent on conquest? Had not their grandparents fought alongside my Tennessee, Carolina and Virginia ancestors for our nation's independence?
Seems like almost everyone chose one side or the other in that war. My Story ancestors in Tennessee split over the conflict, supporters of Tennessee and the Confederacy calling themselves "Story," and supporters of the Federal Government, despite Tennessee's secession, calling themselves "Storie." I continued to question. How had men from the northern States acquired such intense hatred of Tennesseans and other southern States men in such a short time? How could northern States political activists have accomplished such a thing? Why had their propaganda been so compelling?
World War II had ended only three years prior to those school-day trips past the thousands of gravestones, so stories of those horrible events were still fresh in my mind. I could not understand how Hitler had filled the hearts of the German people with such hatred. I could not fathom why the Gentile Germans had suddenly perceived the Jewish Germans, who they had lived and worked alongside for generations, to be hated enemies. Gentile Germans had stolen everything from the Jews, hunted them down and crowded them into concentration camps. There they had treated them much worse than African American slaves, as they extracted as much work from them as their shriveled bodies could produce. Then they had stripped them naked and shot them or gassed them to death. They had cremated the bodies in giant furnaces, or dumped them into huge holes in the ground. That had been in 1938 to 1945.
At the time of my school-day trips past the gravestones the Iron Curtain had closed off Eastern Europe. Although Western Europe was regaining sanity, many people in the Soviet sphere were suffering greatly, and I weighed that issue as well as I puzzled over the rows of gravestones from my school bus window, for at that very time millions were dying under the hard hand of Communist militants. China was engaged in a civil war that the Communists seemed to be winning. And much blood would flow as Communist militants eliminated China's upper class -- that is everyone not lucky enough to escape to Formosa.
The world had witnessed the awesome atomic bomb three years previously. With such conflict in the Communist part of the world, my occasional thoughts of a future atomic war were understandably frightening.
Although I occasionally pondered the horrors chronicled above, mine was a happy and normal childhood; yet I would occasionally think about them. At those times my mind attempted to understand how humanity could be made to suffer Communist persecution, World War II and the War Between the States. Were the political causes in any way similar?
At that time, I had not learned the details of the Battle of Murfreesboro. Oh, I would ask questions that my parents, uncles and grandfather would attempt to answer in a manner befitting an inquisitive boy. But no one could explain why the war had occurred. By the time I reached my teens I understood the battle basics. The terrible battle had occurred between Christmas and New Year's Day over 80 years previously, a few years before Granddad was born. A Federal army, made up of soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and other northern States, had invaded Tennessee the previous spring and conquered Nashville. The Battle of Murfreesboro had been the start of the Federal drive down the railroad line from Nashville to Chattanooga, to Atlanta and on to the coast at Savannah. The Confederate Army of Tennessee had been defending Murfreesboro. It was made up of men from Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, and other Confederate States. As the battle had raged across Granddad's farm, Federal surgeons had used our farmhouse as a field hospital. The bloodstains covering the upstairs floors were from horrible wounds and from amputations performed by Federal doctors and assistants, who sawed off irreparable arms and legs, tossed them out the window, drew the skin tight against each stump and stitched it closed. The battle had been terribly brutal; about 3,000 men had been killed, and a much higher number had been wounded.
Living in that old battlefield farmhouse, amid the bloodstains, transformed my country's war history into a very personal story -- a powerful story of terrible times 85 years back into the past. Yet I readily tucked it away, safely in the back of my mind.
As the years of my life went by, when I occasionally encountered discussion of the war, those bloodstains would come forward and haunt me with their crying: “Someday you must tell us, ‘Why?’” Whenever I encountered books, movies or dramas about the War Between the States, my heart would be heavy over the tragedy of it all. Although others would marvel at the generals and military tactics, I would despair of the vicious politics that somehow had caused the bloody conflict. As a teenager, as a college man, as a young father, as a career chemical engineer, as a grandfather -- throughout those many happy years, beneath the surface -- I hoped to find understanding. Yet it would largely elude me, for my search for the truth remained a casual thing. Perhaps this book will tell me "Why?" Perhaps this movie will help, or this documentary. But none did. Perhaps a deep understanding would forever elude me.
Then one day I finally resolved to undertake a determined study of the political history of that era. Passing into my late fifties, I came to realize that the time for truly serious study had come. No longer would I wait for some book or movie to come to me with the answers; I would search them out. Now was the time to launch a determined personal search for the answer to the "Why?" that called out from those bloodstains -- those bloodstains that ever pleaded to be understood. Mine would be a thorough and critical search, born of perseverance and dogged structure. I resolved to cover a vast time, a huge continent, three great races of mankind, and ugly politics, and more ugly politics, for I would be wrestling with the propaganda laid down by clever and secretive political partisans. I would be sorting fact from fiction, sifting for the truth, probing into the hearts of powerful men long dead. A deep understanding requires such a wrestle.
It is now the year 2004, the year 2005 will soon be here, and I am retired and have passed by my sixty-sixth birthday. Over the past ten years I have wrestled with hundreds of historical documents, and have thereby acquired a deep understanding of “the Politics that Produced the American Civil War.” And I have chosen a method of presenting, in a book of four volumes, an epic history of those politically charged years, so that others can readily acquire a similar deep understanding.
Of that conflict, perhaps you have read much of -- "Who?" -- "What?" -- "Where?" -- and "When?" Those questions are the easy ones. In my book of four volumes I have tackled the tough one: that profound little three-letter word that so often defies understanding; that profound little three-letter word that must be mastered to acquire wisdom; the simple, yet elusive word, "Why?"
You may now purchase the first, second and third volumes of my four-volume series. I hope you will take an interest in my study. Write me at P. O. Box 78731, Charlotte NC 28271, send me an email at hwhite4@carolina.rr.com or call me at 704-242-0022.